Technical Field
This invention relates generally to a garment, and more particularly to a medical garment.
Background Art
Patients undergoing medical procedures can experience difficulty maintaining a sufficient body temperature to promote healing. For example, during a medical procedure requiring anesthetization, a patient's core body temperature can drop up to 1.7 degrees centigrade due to anesthetization. During recovery, it can be advantageous to keep the patient warm. Benefits of patient warmth include a lower risk of infection after the procedure, faster healing, and lower incidents of excessive bleeding.
Keeping a recovering patient warm is not a trivial task. One cannot simply “turn up the thermostat” in the patient's room because doing so is inherently inefficient. Prior art devices designed for patient warming have been cumbersome and expensive. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,125,238 to Ragan et al. describes a disposable patient heating blanket where multiple layers form an air chamber. A complex series of blowers, heating devices, cooling devices, and so forth are then connected to the device. This complex network of machines then introduces conditioned air into the chamber. The problem with such devices, aside from cost and complexity, is that the necessary tubes, conduits, and machines are cumbersome to use and are noisy. Accordingly, the use of these systems can prevent a recovering patient from sleeping well, which can inhibit the recovery process.
It would be advantageous to have a more effective and lower cost patient warming device.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of embodiments of the present invention.